The Measure of a Man (4 page)

The question opened doors that helped me to understand that special place. I told him, first of all, that I had no recollection of having seen myself in a mirror at that time. I couldn’t remember having ever seen a looking glass in our house, or any other kind of glass anywhere on the island (except maybe rum bottles on the shelf of Damite Farrah’s shop). No glass windows, no glass doors, no stores with glass fronts. Our family didn’t drink from glassware; we drank from enamel cups. Reflections, of course, from pond water, baking pans, various other kinds of metals. That’s what I had. That’s
all
I had. Occasional glimpses from reflections. Never was I able to recall having seen myself in a mirror. So I never got a fix on my color. No reason to. With no frame of reference to evidence its necessity, the issue never arose. There was one guy in Arthur’s Town, a doctor, who was white, and Damite Farrah, the shopkeeper, who was white. These guys were different-looking, yes. But neither represented power. Therefore, I never translated their color into that. Or control…or hostility…or oppression…or anything of that nature. They were just there, and I never wondered why they were white and the rest of the people were black.

So in answer to my friend’s question, I
didn’t
think about the color of my skin. Not any more than I would have bothered to wonder why the sand was white or the sky was blue.

But outside the island of my early years, a world was waiting that would focus on my color to the exclusion of all else, never
caring to go beyond that superficial characteristic to see what else I might have to offer. As I entered this world, I would leave behind the nurturing of my family and my home, but in another sense I would take their protection with me. The lessons I had learned, the feelings of groundedness and belonging that had been woven into my character there, would be my companions on the journey. But so too would those intimations of the dark side I had first glimpsed in myself, even in the idyllic setting of my childhood, that I didn’t yet understand. As I moved on to live my life, fidelity and faithlessness, great good fortune and barely skirted annihilation, would flicker in and out of the script of my life. Always, lurking behind the objects and experiences of the everyday world, there were the mysteries. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why have I survived, even prospered? Is it all purely random and meaningless, or is there something more to be revealed?

WHEN I WENT BACK to the Bahamas to live in the seventies, I had a small boat, about a twenty-footer, that I used just for solitude. I would go cruising by myself quite a ways out from the eastern end of Nassau. One day, while fishing a few miles from a cluster of small, uninhabited islands, I got a big strike that felt like a good-size fish. I stood up in the boat to set the hook, and as I furiously started reeling the fish in, something happened—and it was gone.

I don’t know whether the fish just got loose or a barracuda took it, but suddenly there I was, floundering, sulking over the loss of my fish, and the line was loose, drifting down into the water.

Because I was slow to react, the line sank to the bottom, and because I was over coral, which was maybe forty feet down, the hook got stuck. Still standing up in the boat, I figured I’d start the motor and back over the spot where my hook was wedged in and then pull it the other way. So I started the motor and was moving around, and as I was fussing with the line, trying to get it unhooked, the boat swaying this way and that, I suddenly realized that if I fell off that boat with the motor going, and going just fast enough so that there was no way I could catch it by swimming behind it—well, not to put too fine a point on it, if I fell out of that boat, I’d be done for. Bye-bye. All over.

I was maybe two and a half miles from the nearest island, in forty feet of open water. I could float, mind you. I could get on my back and float, but the tide would have to be ideal not to move me away, pull me out in the direction of the Gulf Stream even if I were paddling like the whole U.S. Olympic swim team rolled into one.

Once again I had yielded to the seduction of risk, only to recoil from the awful sense of vulnerability. No beautiful wife, no film credits, no lovely friends and dinner invitations, no money in the bank was going to save me if I fell into the drink. After that realization I never, ever moved around in the boat unless I was anchored, and I never, ever started the motor unless I was seated at the console. But it was hardly the last time I would dance close to the edge.

Nassau was my first exposure to the myriad risks that lay outside the natural world. Urban life was infinitely more than
I had expected, and it came at me with breakneck speed. Forming. Shaping. Molding. Seasoning a ten-and-a-half-year-old boy to bring him rapidly up to speed in a town where everything moved ten times faster than in the place he had left behind. Everything was new. Friends, values, social imprinting, transfer of allegiance from the old family of blood to the new family of friends.

At the age of ten and a half, I ran smack into Urban. Modern. Cars. Movies. Hotels. Restaurants. Night clubs. Bars. Dance halls. And that transition from childhood idyll to Urban launched me straight into manhood. By the age of fourteen I was no longer a child.

When childhood is aborted, it’s like aborted grief. In both cases, if you don’t go through all the stages, giving each its due, the job never gets completed. I felt that double thing: part of me said, “Yes—make the plans, do the decisions, take the responsibility, pull the load”; at the same time, I felt that there was a kid inside me who’d never got finished.

The pain I felt most sharply was the loss of camaraderie, the sense of belonging. I grieved for the love, the trust, and the feel-good giggles that had once bubbled up and bound me to the friends of my childhood, most of whom are dead now, and bound those childhood friends to me. Not that my life was all that bad.

Even these days the smile still comes when I think how we used to go to the movies in Nassau, then come back in the evening and act out all the parts. Then there was the time we stole a case of rum during a riot and climbed over the eight-foot
wall of an old, run-down estate, settled in some bushes, and drank till we got pissed. Then found we couldn’t climb back over the wall! Every day, with testosterone kicking ass, we would search out something crazy to do.

Whenever I could play games in those early days in Nassau…whenever I could run with buddies…go to a movie…hang with the fellas…do harmless but mischievous and, I suppose, childish things—that was my delight. I have great remembrances of long, long silences filled with the satisfaction, the pleasure of just being together doing nothing in particular. Or suddenly bursting into laughter from a remembered moment once shared. Laughing till I cried was a special kind of joy. Laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

I didn’t have much of that for very long. All of it stopped before I could finish being a kid. But today the laughter of birds and the chatter of monkeys remind me that the source experiences that trigger delight in each of us are different. To each of us a certain kind, in each of us a certain amount. Nothing is transferable. One makes do with what one gets.

Plunked down so suddenly in the middle of that new world, I had to struggle to get a fix on myself. I ended up getting a look at me by looking at that new world. As I looked at the goods it had available, I could see myself reflected in the glass window showcases of all the stores I passed on Bay Street. I had to get a fix on the folks, too. Now there were white people all over the place. A hell of a lot more than the two at Arthur’s Town, Cat Island.

When I first went to school in Nassau I attended Eastern Senior, which was a long way off from where we lived—a
good four-mile walk one way. And four miles back. On the convoluted route I liked, because it appeared to be a shortcut, I ran into a white kid who was about my age. His name was Carl, and I would see him almost every day on my way
from
school or on my way
to
school. He seemed to be friendly enough, so one day I stopped to talk with him. In a couple of weeks we had struck up a loose friendship, exchanging thoughts of interest to our age and gender. I would learn from him by asking questions; he would respond, and in turn ask questions of me. In time we arrived at the question of race. He wasn’t at all shy about letting me know that
he
was better off than I was, on the basis of his color. According to the gospel as he had learned it, I would never have the same opportunities, the same circumstance in life that he would.

I waited for the punchline. None came. He was dead serious! When I recovered from the shock, what he had said rankled the shit out of me. I responded with all the things I suppose a young black kid
would
say. You know the sort of thing. “I can do anything you can do. I can climb a tree as quickly as you. I can run as fast as you. I can do anything you can do, quicker and better.”

But the more I protested, the more my words seemed to reinforce his matter-of-fact smugness. His whole manner indicated that this wasn’t deluded opinion he was spouting; to him it was absolute truth. I kept pounding back until he got testy, and then we both pounded back some more. We went on like that for some time, shooting at each other the most hurtful things we could think of, only to wind up as eleven-year-old boys
tend to wind up: pissed, exhausted, and off on their separate ways to other concerns—until they see each other again, and then it’s like nothing happened.

Three years later, in another part of Nassau, I met a girl named Dorothy. She was very fair complected, but you could see that there was some color there. She lived out near the water in a mixed neighborhood with her mother and a brother. When I met her I had pleasant feelings like butterflies in my stomach, and it appeared that she had the same. We started making eyes at each other and some magic happened. Then I met her brother—who turned out to be Carl. They were from two different fathers, Carl and his sister. The mother was white. And the father of Dorothy was a person of color.

So I suppose Carl was in a complicated situation emotionally. And I suppose that he felt better when his vanity could get a boost at the expense of mine. But his conflict was not unusual. In Nassau, race was still a slightly ambiguous issue.

For some people, though, there was no ambiguity. One day on West Bay Street, when I was walking past the old fort near the waterfront, I saw ahead of me an older white guy coming on a bicycle. Had to have been between eighteen and twenty, I’d say. I was walking along toward the west. Just the two of us on the street, you know? No cars or anything at that particular time. He was moving east on the left-hand side of the street when I noticed him starting to turn toward me. I figured he was heading around the upcoming corner. He rode up, and as he got abreast of me he took his right hand off his handlebar and punched me right in the face.

BOOM
!

I was stunned. It took me a few seconds to pull myself together, and when I did, I saw him tearing ass a mile a minute toward the center of town. I took off after him. But he was heading downtown, and downtown was
owned
by white people. Of course, at age fourteen that made no difference to me.

He looked back and he saw me coming, running as hard and as fast as I could.

He ducked around a corner and onto Bay Street, which was the main business thoroughfare. By the time I arrived at the foot of the street and looked east, he had disappeared. Not a bicycle in sight.

I went into every store looking for him. I walked Bay Street, remembering what he looked like, remembering how he was dressed, and even
now
I can still see him. Clear as can be. He was dressed in bicycle gear, decked out as only a kid of some wealth could be.

After a good hour looking, I still hadn’t found him.

Which was lucky for me. In retrospect, maybe one of the luckiest occurrences of my life. Considering my state of mind, had I found him, chances are I would have gone right at him. But with the full power of the state inevitably on his side, the satisfaction I sought would have come at a very high price.

Beyond these first tinges of racism, I also became aware of something else that I had never before come upon. Even though I had only the dimmest glimmer of an understanding of the concept of “class,” it came to me in the form of a warning: “Here, not everybody is the same.” I absorbed the message that
there were ground rules I would be expected to observe. I saw quite quickly that the entire white population was an elite element when evaluated against the black population, but there was obviously an elite element even
within
the white population. And there was an elite element to the
black
population as well.

The black upper class was a good thing to see, but to me, it smelled like a warning as well. There were black businessmen. There were black school principals, black policemen, black judges,
and
black lawyers. The majority of the blacks, of course, were workaday poor, very poor. Poor in Nassau was like poor on Cat Island, only tougher, because survival in Nassau was more heavily dependent on money. In Nassau even some black folks had electricity, but we still used a kerosene lamp. Some had a bathroom in the house, and glassware dishes, even an icebox. For the first time I began to see myself against that reality. There were haves and have-nots, and we definitely had very little. We had no money, no power. We lived in the requisite neighborhood for
those
people.

I then knew what the pecking order in that part of the world was. Couldn’t miss it. Plus, I knew where
I
was in
it
. For myself, it was okay, because my life was ahead of me. But I didn’t like where my dad was in it. My father, an honorable fellow trying awfully hard, was at the very bottom of the pole. I remember one occasion distinctly. He was sitting on the porch near the door of the last house we lived in, before I left Nassau. As I barreled past him on my way out to hook up with friends, he reached out and stopped me. He looked me up and down.
He felt my arms. I must have appeared rather thin to him. He said, “You’re not eating regularly, are you, son?” I said, “I’m okay. I’m all right. I’m fine.” He didn’t say more. I felt terrible for him because I knew what was going on in his head that he couldn’t put in words. I loved him for it, you know?

My mother used to buy flour sacks and make pants and shirts for my school clothes. Seemingly endless fun was made of me because I wore the emblem of the flour company on my bottom. But knowing that my mom and dad were doing the best they could gave me the strength to suck it up and move on. Especially when Mom said, “Look, this is where we are now. There’s no shame in what you wear as long as it’s clean. Your father and me, we put clothes on your back as best we can. You just remember there are other colored people who have a lot more. So it’s just a question of—well, maybe one day we’ll do better; maybe one day we’ll get there too. It’s not impossible, son. It’s not impossible.”

But that environment didn’t make it easy. By the age of thirteen I had dropped out of school, a short tenure, given that my formal education began around the age of eleven. At the age for junior-high sock-hops I was doing hard labor around construction jobs. My best friend, Yorick Rolle, was caught stealing a bicycle—an adventure I don’t to this day know why I wasn’t a part of—and he was sent off for four tough years in the colonial prison system. My brother Cedric, two years older than I, was sent away because of a bizarre extortion scheme that was fueled by a combination of adolescent naïveté and too many caper movies, I’m sure. And even I, little Sidney Poitier,
was jailed briefly for stealing corn. So it wasn’t a tough call for my father to say he had to get me out of there. I was sent off to live in Miami with my brother Cyril, more than ten years my senior.

MIAMI SHARED A CLIMATE and lifestyle with the Caribbean, but its culture and mores were of the American South, 1940s Jim Crow style, and nothing had prepared me to surrender my pride and self-regard sufficiently to accept those humiliations. In fact, it was quite the opposite. My values and my sense of self were already fully constructed.

Which is another way of saying that I was already a kid who wasn’t gonna take any bullshit—from anybody.

While I was in no position to force society to accept me as I wanted to be accepted, I still had to let people know what
my
rules were. For a while I had a job as a delivery boy, and on one of my first assignments I was sent to a wealthy home in Miami Beach. I went to the front door and rang the bell, and a lady came to the door and said, “What do you want?”